“What could it have been?” exclaimed Lady Isabel, in an undertone, to Wilson.
“I know,” was the oracular answer. “I saw this same sort of an attack once before, madame.”
“And what caused it?”
“Twasn’t in a child though,” went on Wilson—“‘twas in a grown person. But that’s nothing, it comes for the same thing in all. I think he was taken for death.”
“Who?” uttered Lady Isabel, startled.
Wilson made no reply in words, but she pointed with her finger to the bed.
“Oh, Wilson, he is not so ill as that. Mr. Wainwright said this morning, that he might last a week or two.”
Wilson composedly sat herself down in the easiest chair. She was not wont to put herself out of the way for the governess; and that governess was too much afraid of her, in one sense, to let her know her place. “As to Wainwright, he’s nobody,” quoth she. “And if he saw the child’s breath going out before his face, and knew that the next moment would be his last, he’d vow to us all that he was good for twelve hours to come. You don’t know Wainwright as I do, madame. He was our doctor at mother’s; and he has attended in all the places I have lived in since I went out to service. Five years I was maid at Mrs. Hare’s. I came here when Miss Lucy was a baby, and in all my places has he attended, like one’s shadow. My Lady Isabel thought great guns of old Wainwright, I remember. It was more than I did.”
My Lady Isabel made no response to this. She took a seat and watched William through her glasses. His breathing was more labored than usual.
“That idiot, Sarah, says to me to-day, says she, ‘Which of his two grandpapas will they bury him by, old Mr. Carlyle or Lord Mount Severn?’ ‘Don’t be a calf!’ I answered her. ‘D’ye think they’ll stick him out in the corner with my lord?—he’ll be put into the Carlyle vault, of course,’ It would have been different, you see, Madame Vine, if my lady had died at home, all proper—Mr. Carlyle’s wife. They’d have buried her, no doubt, by her father, and the boy would have been laid with her. But she did not.”